The use of manufacturing work instructions is an important aspect of the manufacturing process. However, manufacturing work instructions are not managed within a common business system or enterprise library. Typical existing work instruction processes are very labor intensive, i.e. current text based work instruction systems are manually created and maintained. Therefore, when the engineering definition and engineering process specifications change, manufacturing work instruction library administrators must assess the impact of each change and manually modify the text based work instructions within the product specific work instruction library and update all manufacturing process plans impacted by an engineering change.
Current manufacturing work instruction authoring systems also refer to the engineering process specification authority documents using terms like: “in accordance with” for each branch or leaf found within a specific engineering specification family or hierarchy.
In referencing authority documents in this manner, a user must reference and cross-reference the same document or set of documents multiple times, which takes additional time and effort, e.g., current systems replicate engineering definition and process specification requirements using similar text, lacking any direct link or active link to the source engineering authority document. Frequently, it is difficult to locate copies of the cross-referenced documents resulting in additional inefficiencies. Consequently, existing manufacturing work instruction systems lack the object linking behavior that would qualify the data as being authoritative.
This existing method is inefficient and typically results in inaccurate or obsolete work instructions being delivered to the factory floor, which adversely affects the quality and configuration of the product and it results in delay, rework and manufacturing errors.
Further, the engineering process specification documents used, in part, to develop the manufacturing work instructions are typically managed within an isolated content management system. Engineering process specification documents are typically text based and also contain illustrations, tables, and graphics that are not formatted or structured for reuse.